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The Brooklyn Daily Union
TypeDaily newspaper (Mon-Fri)
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)
Publisher
  • Union Publishing Co. (1863–6?)
  • Henry E. Bowen (1870–73)
Editor
Associate editorLaura C. Holloway (1871–73)
Staff writersMary C. Ames (1869–72)
Founded1863
Political alignmentRepublican
LanguageEnglish
Ceased publication1883
HeadquartersCnr. Front and Fulton Sts., Brooklyn
CityBrooklyn, New York
CountryUnited States
Sister newspapers

The Brooklyn Daily Union,[a] later the Brooklyn Daily Union-Argus, was a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Brooklyn, New York from 1863 to 1883. Founded to provide a voice in support of the Lincoln administration at the height of the American Civil War, the paper survived an early period of poor management to become prosperous and successful. Notable editors during the paper's history included abolitionist Theodore Tilton and early feminist Laura C. Holloway, while contributors included Walt Whitman and pioneering female journalist Mary C. Ames. The Union was also one of the first journals to publish poetry by Emily Dickinson.

History

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Establishment

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In 1863, New York's Daily Star, a Republican newspaper, suspended publication. Dissatisfied with the equivocal support of the Lincoln administration by the city's remaining Republican-leaning papers, and concerned about the increasingly strident criticism of the government by The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a group of influential Republicans, headed by S. B. Chittenden, proposed the founding of a new daily paper to promote the Republican perspective. This proposal met with support, and $60,000 was raised to establish the Union Publishing Company, so called after the name Union was selected for the new paper. The full nameplate eventually chosen for the new daily was The Brooklyn Daily Union.[1]

The company was initially run by a committee "according to an amateurish and somewhat complicated plan", and the first edition of the Union, published September 14, 1863, was consequently a disappointment to its backers. The Union continued to struggle financially until The Brooklyn City News, another struggling paper, was consolidated together with its advertising revenues into the Union on November 10, assuring the Union's success.[1]

Civil War period, 1863–65

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The Brooklyn Daily Union remained a loyal and eloquent supporter of President Abraham Lincoln throughout the war. Upon his renomination in the lead-up to the 1864 election, the paper editorialized:

The nomination of Lincoln went straight to the popular ear, and found firm lodgement there ... The qualities which won for our noble President his abiding place in their confidence are not such as fade or fail. His calm deliberateness of judgement, his firmness in conclusions reached, his unimpeachable personal honesty, his unswerving fidelity to duty, and above all, that simple and earnest love of our popular institutions which always controls him, continue still to win and hold the respect of the people.[2]

Lincoln, buoyed by General Sherman's victory at Atlanta, went on to win the election in a landslide, taking all but two states and 212 of 232 electoral votes.[3]

During the war, Walt Whitman contributed occasional war-related articles to The Brooklyn Daily Union,[4] the last and probably best known of which was published on March 16, 1865, a few weeks before the war's end. This was an account of the war experiences of his younger brother George, who had joined the Union Army in 1861, and subsequently, in Whitman's words, "been in twenty-one engagements or sieges ... marched across eighteen states, traversing some of them across and back again in all directions ... journeyed ... over twenty thousand miles; and ... fought under Burnside, McClellan, McDowell, Meade, Pope, Hooker, Sherman and Grant."[5] Whitman noted that his brother's preservation through nearly four years of war seemed "a miracle" given that George was one of "not a dozen" original members of his regiment to serve out the war, most of his comrades having not survived the conflict.[5]

A poem of Emily Dickinson's also appeared in The Brooklyn Daily Union during the war—one of only ten of Dickinson's poems to be published in her lifetime.[6][7] Of these, four were printed on the Union's presses—three in the literary journal The Drum Beat, a periodical edited at the Union offices by Richard Salter Storrs, and the last, "Success is counted sweetest", in the Union itself on April 27, 1864.[6][8] All poems of Dickinson's published during her lifetime were published anonymously, apparently due to the ambivalence of the poet to the prospect of fame.[6][7]

Tilton appointment and sacking

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In 1869, Henry C. Bowen, proprietor of the highly successful political-religious weekly The Independent, purchased The Brooklyn Daily Union, giving his son Henry E. Bowen a one-third share in the newspaper and appointing him as publisher.[9] Bowen Sr. appointed Theodore Tilton as the Union's editor, who also retained his position as editor of The Independent.[10]

Tilton had played a vital role in The Independent's success by recording in shorthand for publication the extempore speeches of clergyman and gifted orator Henry Ward Beecher, and Bowen Sr., Tilton and Beecher shared a close relationship, thanks in part to their mutual opposition to slavery during the Civil War.[11] After his appointment to the Union, however, Tilton began advocating free love in the pages of The Independent, a doctrine at odds with both Beecher's publicly expressed views and with much of the paper's readership.[11][12] Tilton and Beecher also publicly disagreed on the best approach to Reconstruction. When Tilton began using the editorial pages of the Union to attack corruption in the Grant administration, contrary to Bowen's desire to cultivate a closer relationship with it, Bowen with Beecher's support dismissed Tilton from his editorial positions at both The Independent and the Union.[13][12] Tilton would later unsuccessfully sue Beecher for an alleged adulterous relationship with his wife in what would become one of the greatest scandals of the era.[14]

After the sacking of Tilton, Henry C. Bowen himself took over as the Union's editor,[15] while his son Henry E. Bowen continued as publisher.[9]

Female journalists

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In addition to Tilton, another former writer for The Independent to begin working for The Brooklyn Daily Union after Bowen's acquisition of the paper was pioneering female journalist Mary C. Ames. Unlike most female journalists of the period, who wrote columns deemed of interest only to females, Ames worked from Washington, D.C. as a political correspondent.[16] Her work for the Union included not only a daily column, but book reviews, editorials and a role in the paper's management.[17] Ames is believed to have been the first American female journalist not to write under a pseudonym.[16] She remained with The Brooklyn Daily Union for three years, from 1869 to 1872;[16][18] her $5,000 Union salary in 1872 was reportedly the highest ever paid to a female journalist at the time.[18]

Laura C. Holloway,[b] who like Ames is considered an early feminist,[19] began her own career as a journalist at the Union in 1870.[c] Promoted to an editorial position by 1871, she moved to the Union's rival The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1873.[21] While typical female journalists of the time worked from home or an editorial office, Holloway was one of the first to work directly in the newsroom itself, an environment then considered unladylike.[22] Holloway was an advocate of economic independence for women, which she believed to be a more important issue than female suffrage.[23]

Later history

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In 1873, a political syndicate headed by General Benjamin F. Tracy, future Brooklyn mayor Frederick A. Schroeder and John F. Henry purchased the Brooklyn Daily Union from the Bowens.[9] In 1877 the Union merged with the Brooklyn Daily Argus to become the Brooklyn Daily Union-Argus. The Brooklyn Daily Union-Argus ceased publication in 1883.[24][25]

Footnotes

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  1. ^ As with many 19th-century examples, the paper appears to have employed a variety of names for itself, sometimes simultaneously. In the 1860s it usually referred to itself as The Brooklyn Daily Union. In the 1870s, its nameplate was shortened to just Brooklyn Daily Union but other pages in the same edition were headed The Brooklyn Union, with a similar pattern prevailing after the paper became the Brooklyn Daily Union-Argus.
  2. ^ Later known by her married name of Holloway Langford.
  3. ^ "Laura Holloway was an editor at the Brooklyn Daily Union, 1870-1873, at a time when few women held full-time jobs in newsrooms."[20]

References

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  1. ^ a b Stiles 1870. p. 941.
  2. ^ Trefousse 2005. p. 106.
  3. ^ Boyer et al 2007. p. 457.
  4. ^ Loving 2000. p. 518.
  5. ^ a b Whitman, Walt (16 Mar 1865). Folsom, Ed; Price, Kenneth M. (eds.). "Return of a Brooklyn Veteran". The Walt Whitman Archive. Retrieved 2015-04-25.
  6. ^ a b c "Publications in Dickinson's Lifetime". Emily Dickinson Museum. 2009.
  7. ^ a b Scholnick 1995. pp. 166-67.
  8. ^ Mike Kelly (15 Jul 2013). "Emily Dickinson and the New York Press". The Consecrated Eminence. Archived version.
  9. ^ a b c "Henry Elliot Bowen". The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 1919-06-16. p. 6.
  10. ^ Fox 1999. p. 148.
  11. ^ a b "Theodore Tilton (1835-1907)". Mr. Lincoln and New York. The Lehrman Institute. Retrieved 2015-05-02.
  12. ^ a b Dorrien 2001. pp. 238-39.
  13. ^ Fox 1999. pp. 148-49.
  14. ^ Donald, David Herbert (2000-01-30). "True Soap Opera". The New York Times.
  15. ^ "The Brooklyn Union". The Brooklyn Daily Union. 1871-12-09.
  16. ^ a b c Riley 1995. p. 10.
  17. ^ Dooley 1996. p. 4.
  18. ^ a b Dooley 1996. p. 1.
  19. ^ Sasson 2012. p. xii.
  20. ^ Tennessee Historical Society (2008). "(Title unknown)". Tennessee Historical Quarterly. 67. Tennessee Historical Society: 206.
  21. ^ Sasson 2012. pp. 29, 40.
  22. ^ Sasson 2012. p. 18.
  23. ^ Sasson 2012. pp. 41, 171, 267.
  24. ^ "About The Brooklyn daily union. (Brooklyn [N.Y.]) 1870-1877". Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Retrieved 2015-04-28.
  25. ^ "About Brooklyn daily union-Argus. (Brooklyn, N.Y.) 1877-1883". Chronicling America. Library of Congress. Retrieved 2015-04-28.

Bibliography

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  • Albanese, Catherine L.; Stein, Stephen J. (2012). "Foreword". In Sasson, Diane (ed.). Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. xii. ISBN 9780253001771.
  • Boyer, Paul; Clark, Jr., Clifford; Kett, Joseph; Salisbury, Neal; Sitkoff, Harvard; Woloch, Nancy (2007). The Enduring Vision (6th AP ed.). Houghton Mifflin. p. 457. ISBN 978-0-618-80163-3.
  • Dooley, Patricia L. (1996). "Mary Clemmer Ames (1831–1884)". In Signorielli, Nancy (ed.). Women in Communication: A Biographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 1–7. ISBN 9780313291647.
  • Dorrien, Gary J. (2001). The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900. Vol. 1. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. pp. 238-39. ISBN 9780664223540.
  • Fox, Richard Wightman (1999). Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 148-49. ISBN 9780226259383.
  • Loving, Jerome (2000). Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkely, CA: University of California Press. p. 518. ISBN 9780520226876.
  • Riley, Sam G. (1995). Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 10. ISBN 9780313291920.
  • Sasson, Diane (2012). Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 9780253001771.
  • Scholnick, Robert J. (1995). ""Don't tell! They'd advertise": Emily Dickinson in the Round Table". In Price, Kenneth M.; Smith, Susan Belasco (eds.). Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. pp. 166–67. ISBN 9780813916293.
  • Stiles, Henry Reed (1870). A History of the City of Brooklyn. Vol. III. Brooklyn, NY: by subscription. p. 941.
  • Trefousse, Hans Louis (2005). "First among equals": Abraham Lincoln's Reputation During His Administration. New York: Fordham University Press. p. 106. ISBN 9780823224685.




refs

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  • ... that in an 1864 article in The Brooklyn Daily Union, Walt Whitman revealed that his brother George was one of only ten original members of his regiment to survive the American Civil War?
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